Frédéric Chopin's 4 Scherzi are high points in the Romantic piano repertoire. Chopin here takes a traditional genre and fills it with radically new content. They are wild, demonic in tone, and there is little about them that is joke-like, despite the original meaning of their title.

Referring to the 1st Scherzo, Robert Schumann asked: 'how should seriousness be attired, when even a "joke" is veiled in black?.' Now that the Scherzi nos. 1-4 have been published in revised stand-alone editions,...